By Andrea Welsh BRASILIA, Brazil, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Brazil, home to the world's largest rainforest, will ask rich nations to back a plan to help it slow deforestation at global climate talks this week, a senior environmental official said. The plan marks a first step toward including deforestation in global climate agreements to cut emissions of carbon, a heat-trapping gas released by burning fossil fuels and trees that is partly to blame for rising world temperatures. Officials from dozens of nations were to meet in Kenya starting Monday for the 12th round of U.N. global climate talks since 1992. The goal is to start crafting an extension to the Kyoto Protocol, a 1999 treaty that set mandatory targets for most rich nations to reduce carbon emissions. The Brazilian secretary of forests and biodiversity, Joao Paulo Capobianco, said Brazil will present a plan for rich nations to put money into a fund that developing countries can tap after they prove they have slowed initial deforestation rates. "A country will only have the right to claim resources after the environmental benefit is delivered," he said in an interview. Critics have said Brazil just wants to get paid for protecting the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest and home to maybe a quarter of all species on earth. Slowing deforestation was a cheap and fast way to lower global carbon emissions, nearly a fifth of which come from clearing land and burning trees, Capobianco said. "When deforestation comes up, people in America, England, France, Italy, they take to the streets and protest because Brazil is cutting down the rainforest," Capobianco said. "The question isn't why would they invest money in this. The question is why wouldn't they?" Under the Kyoto Protocol, Brazil cannot get credit for slowing deforestation although it burns relatively little oil and gas. A third of its carbon emissions come from felling trees in the Amazon. In 2005, enough trees were cut down to cover all of Israel or Wales. To date, about a fifth of Brazil's Amazon has been cleared -- an area twice the size of Germany -- mostly to produce lumber, graze cattle or plant crops like rice and soy. Capobianco said Brazil reduced land-clearing by a third last year and could do better if given credit for the carbon emissions avoided. More money would go to invest in new economic models for the rainforest, which makes poor farm land because of its sandy soil and frequent floods, he said. "People don't cut down the Amazon because they're angry at trees," he said. "It's actually expensive and quite difficult. People do it because it's how they guarantee their economic survival." Capobianco also said poor nations would gain by lowering carbon emissions more cheaply than they otherwise could. Brazil's plan will need support from other developing nations, which were excused from Kyoto's mandatory carbon cuts so they could focus on economic growth and urgent problems like poverty and disease. The United States, which is responsible for more than a third of the world's carbon emissions, backed out of the treaty saying it unfairly exempted countries like China and India from mandatory cuts.
